


Eurydice

by galateas



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Allusions to abuse, Angst, Character Study, Death, F/M, Gen, POV Female Character, Somewhat Graphic Violence, drug usage, get this woman out of the fridge, just general pain and sadness :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27499483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galateas/pseuds/galateas
Summary: The one that got away. That’s what they are always singing their love songs or writing their poetry about.Julia has noticed this. She also notices how 'they' is most often a man, and the one that got away is a woman. Usually it is an affront for this woman to have left; usually she fucks over the man and takes something from him as she leaves, sans merci. Other times the woman is perfectly innocent, but then that probably means she will be tragically killed, and very young. Either way, there don’t seem to be many songs about this situation from the woman’s perspective.***
Relationships: Julia/Spike Spiegel, Julia/Vicious (Cowboy Bebop)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Eurydice

**Author's Note:**

> Julia's character makes me feel so sad, melodramatic, and very much like the Jo March 'WOMEN -' meme. I am always interested in complicating the narrative of the long-lost girlfriend. Every time I come across a character like this I seem to get myself worked up about them, but I guess that's on me.

Don’t pretend it’s such a mystery  
Think about the place where you first met me

 _Getaway Car_ , Taylor Swift

  
  


Marianne: He chose the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.

Heloise: ‘Eurydice spoke a last farewell that scarcely reached Orpheus’ ears and fell back into the abyss.’

... Perhaps she was the one who said ‘turn around’.  
  


_Portrait of a Lady on Fire_ , dir. Celine Sciamma 

***

The one that got away. That’s what they are always singing their love songs or writing their poetry about. 

Julia has noticed this. She also notices how _they_ is most often a man, and the one that got away is a woman. Usually it is an affront for this woman to have left; usually she fucks over the man and takes something from him as she leaves, _sans merci_. Other times the woman is perfectly innocent, but then that probably means she will be tragically killed, and very young. Either way, there don’t seem to be many songs about this situation from the woman’s perspective. 

She knows she herself is Spike’s one that got away. He is probably singing one of those songs about her right now. Maybe he has a right to. Julia does not think regrets are worth having but she does think she might have explained some things to him better. It may well be her fault that he had never fully managed to understand some fundamental things about her. Spike had wanted to get away with her, without knowing what she was getting towards, and that had been the trouble. 

She has been the one that got away before. Spike does know this about her, in fact he is still the only person Julia has ever told in her adult life. When she was seven years old her eighteen-year-old brother was driving them in a car when he swerved and crashed it and it killed both him and the passenger of another car going in the opposite direction. He had been under the influence. Red eye. Julia doesn’t remember a thing about this but she has looked up photographs in the newspaper archives and seen the black-and-white images of the mangled wreckage, the plumes of smoke. There had barely been a scratch on her. Everyone had said she must have had a guardian angel watching over her that day. 

Julia does remember the funeral, not how she felt during it, but that she wore white gloves in church and mouthed the words to Guide me O my Great Redeemer because she didn’t want to sing them out loud. She didn’t believe in any of it: not God, not being guided, not being redeemed. She never has since. The closest Julia has come to seeing angels is the recurring dream where she is on a boat crossing over water and she can see a figure waiting for her on a distant shore. She thinks it is probably her brother but she can’t ever get close enough to tell. She always wakes up before then. 

Maybe the real trouble is not just that Spike didn’t know where she was going, but that she has never known either. 

***

It couldn’t be more fucking obvious why she is drawn to the syndicate, to Vicious. She has spent her teenage years skirting the sorts of circles where people take Red Eye, has never done it herself but has closely and coolly observed its effects. By now she’s seen several friends succumb to it, but they were never able to explain what about it got under their skin so deep that they might be compelled to take it in the middle of the day and get behind the wheel of a car with a little sister in the back seat. Unlike some other members of her family, Julia is not interested in assigning blame about this, she merely has a forensic curiosity about the thing itself. It is not until she meets Vicious that she decides the only way to know is to know. 

Aren’t you worried about losing your innocence, he says when she asks.

I already lost all of it, she replies.

He doesn’t ask what she means, only laughs darkly and says he knows how to get her a vial, two vials, as many as she wants. 

She only feels the need to do it once, in the end. It’s very much a disappointment. Are you sure this is the real stuff, she asks Vicious, because while she does feel momentarily the things she’s supposed to, like she’s tapped into a fiery energy source and like she’s flying out of her body and all the rest of it, she’s very aware the whole time that it’s only chemicals, it’s only getting high. It is simultaneously exactly like people describe and nothing like people describe. 

Of course it’s the real stuff, he says. People kill each other over this, you know.

Do they really kill each other because of that, she says. Or do they kill each other because they want to kill each other.

Later Vicious tells her that’s the moment he fell in love with her.

She doesn’t know the moment that she fell in love with him, or even if she fell at all. She probably treated being in love with him the same way she treated the Red Eye. She wanted to see what it was all about, so it was something she decided to do.

***

At first the other men think she is bad luck, because she always seems to be there when one of them gets killed. They give her a nickname because of it. The Black Widow. It’s typical of men, to be so literal minded. It’s only because she’s a woman, and she wears a lot of black, and happens to be around death a lot. It doesn’t even make any sense. A Black Widow doesn’t just appear where death is, she is death. At the point she gets the nickname Julia hasn’t killed anyone yet. Not with her own hands, anyway. A lot of people think women aren’t even capable of killing with their hands. They only use poison, or sex, or things like that. 

When Julia does finally learn how to use a gun on someone it is hard but she is not incapable. At first it is self defense, then it isn’t. It is always quick and clean. Poison would be a far worse way to die, she thinks. I couldn’t do that, kill someone slowly. 

It takes her several lost years but eventually she begins to suspect that this is what Vicious has been doing to her. She can’t put her finger on what it is, because he never hurts her physically or even says anything overtly cruel to her, but he somehow manages to exert power over everyone and everything so effortlessly. She is starting to feel suffocated from the inside. She is starting to do more and more dangerous things, like driving very fast through the night around blind corners. She has no destination, she just likes the wind in her hair. She has bought a vintage car off a mechanic friend of hers, a beautiful red convertible, and it feels incredible that she should still have control over something in her life. 

Anastasia warns her about the car. Anastasia has warned her about a lot of things, and not one single time has it put Julia off. That thing is a death trap, Anastasia says, not unlike what she had said about getting involved in the syndicate, when they had first met. Like then, the words do not repel Julia but draw her in further. She thinks about the idea that you could trap death: wave a red flag and watch it come running, capture it and bend it to your will. Hasn’t she done it once before?

***

One day Vicious introduces her to an old friend of his who has come back on the scene. His best friend, he says. He recently had a bad accident. 

Julia does not think much of him at first, although she can tell that he is attracted to her almost instantly. He only seems a more naive version of Vicious. What sort of person do you have to be anyway, to end up following in his shadow, she thinks with contempt. Then she realises she is describing herself. 

Do you think Mars is ugly, Spike asks her casually one evening when they are standing outside of a bar, smoking and trying to shelter from the rain under the awnings.

I’ve always thought this particular city strangely beautiful, Julia replies, blowing out smoke and surveying the dark concrete around them. 

Most people think it’s very ugly, he says. I agree with you though. Especially when it’s like this.

It’s the kind of thing the best friend must say to the girlfriend all the time, she thinks. Just making conversation, trying not to be awkward. But it’s the way he’s looking at her with his different colored eyes, and the white noise of the rain around them. 

All this rain, it will end up making the river overflow, she says. When that happens it brings all kinds of detritus ashore. It’s very interesting to see what people throw into it, you know. 

He flicks ash away. Have you ever thrown anything in there, he asks.

I wouldn’t tell you, she laughs. If I threw it away it’s because it’s a secret. 

He looks at her seriously and says, I thought a secret is something you hold onto.

***

The love Julia had for Vicious reminds her of how his name sounds, like viscera; a feeling deep in her blood and guts. And like the other words, death trap _,_ this had fascinated her at first. It had seemed like a good way to test whether she was still alive. In the end, though, she’d known she had to get it out of her. It had begun to metastasize, push its roots too far down, so that she almost could not live inside herself at all. 

With Spike it is different. The love seems to her to be outside of them both, a separate entity moving around in the room with them. When they say I love you to each other he looks into her eyes with a searching need, and she feels compelled to look back into his, but it makes her think they are missing where the love is really happening. She wants to look outwards instead, to see how it changes the world around them, and follow where it will lead them. The idea of that invigorates her. 

Spike does try to see things her way. Maybe he even succeeds sometimes, but other times it frustrates him and made him accuse her of being distant. She can’t really blame him. It is his first time being in love and he thinks it is supposed to go one certain way. He will say phrases that she suspects he got from a song or a film or something, like I wish we could go back to the beginning and do it all over again, don’t you? And she will say mmm if only, when really she is thinking oh, but what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? Being with Spike makes her feel ravenous for life, only she doesn’t care about taking the bite, she wants to get to the part where she’s already digested it, already lived it. And she wants the bad parts as much as the good. 

When she knows the end has come - and come it does - it is almost more satisfying than the beginning. 

***

So they both get away, but in opposite directions. Julia gets used to skipping town after town after town. She is good at it. The harder part is the being in hiding, but she can still manage that fine. She knows how to find low profile work that would be liable to bore her to death if she didn’t always know how soon she’d be leaving. She cuts her hair short and doesn’t worry that it doesn’t suit her. She sleeps in high-up rooms always close to train lines, the constant rumble of the overnight freights a comfort to her. In between each new stretch of road, the red car stays parked in the types of underground garages that you always have to pay an extortionate fee for, but she can’t bring herself to switch it out for something lower key. It’s the only piece of the past she allows. 

For a time Julia is actually something close to content, even though she is always alert and keeping her ear close to the ground. She is good at being alone, she likes her own company. It is true that she ran away to save Spike’s life but it is also true that eventually she would have run to save her own. Maybe they would have gone together, maybe they wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter. This is the way it happened. She doesn’t do what ifs, only what nows. 

She has a lot of time to think about her life. She can now do things she has never got around to doing before, like read T.S. Eliot and think about his overwhelming question, the one you are not supposed to ask. Is she done with her own asking now? About what? Her brother? Is her whole life really going to revolve around looking for him - revolve around men? How obvious of her. In one of her more hopeful moments she throws the Eliot away. 

She still cares about Spike, of course she does. She hopes he understands, wherever he is, what she had tried to give him. She had leaned into the sunbeams for him, sung to him as she nursed his wounds, held his hand, and now he will remember her as being so much better than she really was. It will keep him going, keep him chasing life. She thinks, if any of us saw how life really is, we wouldn’t want to go after it at all. Dreams are all we have. Even nightmares have an internal logic to them, keep us from looking into the true abyss, which is the chaos at the centre of everything. She still doesn’t have religion but being with Spike has helped her understand why people do, and in a way this is her own version of it. 

Some might say this is a very depressing outlook on life. Spike himself had wanted to believe in higher things like fate - all things happening as they are supposed to and playing out on eternal repeat. But Julia must have seen fate, or God, or whatever it was, die on a day very long ago. This type of faith is locked to her, further from her reach than the sun from the Mariana Trench. And anyway she would rather reach down, down into the dark water. That is the true source, the place where all life begins. 

***

Her hair grows long again and Julia begins to get wind of things, of what Spike and Vicious are both up to. Spike has apparently become a bounty hunter, which she knows through some contacts of hers who run in those same circles, and he seems to keep running into Vicious. It is apparent to her that Spike and Vicious are quite incapable of leaving each other alone. They almost kill each other on a number of occasions, and in very memorable ways. 

Then it is Julia who is almost killed. Whether it’s by accident or on purpose, she has gotten too relaxed, and suddenly the guns have found her again. Something big to do with the syndicate has happened, now Mao is dead and there is a fresh hit on her and Spike - she barely has time to find this all out from Shin’s unexpected tip-off before they are on her. She gets them off her back long enough to throw a few things in a bag and retrieve her car. 

That’s it. It all comes back to this in the end.

***

Julia is screeching by the airport and her pursuers are practically up her backside when an inexplicable thing happens and she suddenly finds herself with a comrade, a fierce-looking woman who insists on involving herself in the action because who knows, maybe she has a death wish or something. Julia has never run and fought with a woman before but it is thanks to her that they get away with it. Go figure. 

But then Julia gets a proper look at her, and in her mind’s eye the words _FAYE VALENTINE_ suddenly materialise, written in block letters on a screen and alongside the word _WANTED._ She recognises this person. This person knows Spike, and now she has saved Julia’s life, and apparently without even knowing who she is. 

Julia still resolutely does not believe in guardian angels. If anything, this meeting is a portent, and it’s not of anything good. She would not have imagined herself as someone who finds portents in things either, but then they do say seeing is believing. She feels very calm. She is getting closer to something. 

They exchange very few words in the aftermath of the chase, but Julia has already recognised other things in this woman’s face, things she has seen in her own. Here is someone with her own red flag, waving it with all her might. Julia wants to ask, what happened to you? There is no time. 

Instead she says, tell Spike to meet me at the place, and she knows straight away that she has judged correctly and given away who she is because Faye stands there frozen and looking like she has seen a ghost. Maybe she has. Julia drives away and thinks I hope you find it, whatever it is you’re waving at, before you become one too. 

***

He comes to the place. Of course he does. She holds up the gun with her finger on the trigger. Julia has pulled plenty of them before. She has been directly responsible for killing people. She has also stood by and let other people die. The latter is easier, and that makes it so much worse. 

She doesn’t pull the trigger. She does the easy thing and puts her arms around him. She wonders if he feels the finality of it like she does. Probably - he remains motionless. The death embrace. 

He comes with her anyway. In the car they barely speak to each other, and when they do it is like a soap opera that has been dubbed into another language, the words not matching up. Julia wonders if Spike changed or if they just never really knew each other. They are acting like strangers. Nevertheless, she can’t shake the feeling that this moment is the only real understanding they have ever shared, that Spike is finally being pulled towards the same centre of gravity as her. They don’t need to talk for this to be true. 

***

They go to Anastasia’s place to load up on ammo. When they arrive, Anastasia has been shot. Oh, thinks Julia as they watch her die. Now here is something worth regretting. 

Spike begins gathering positively armfuls of guns and cartridges. 

***

They are running across the rooftops. There is gunfire all around them. This is the kind of thing that used to make her feel alive. Maybe that had been it, why she’d wasted so much time. She really thought she was immortal once.

She is not immortal. One bullet rips into her and that’s all it takes. She should know. She has seen it happen to so many men. 

***

Julia falls.

Spike comes running, he is holding her and she manages to tell him one last thing. She is glad of that. There are plumes of smoke in the distance. She can barely see them, or him. She clearly sees the boat, the water, the shore. This time they are close and she finally recognizes the stranger waiting for her, standing there so still at the source of everything.

It is not her brother at all, it is herself, and she knows now who that is. Not the one who gets away but the one who lets go.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by the greatly encouraging words of @Moira_Lathal, a truly wonderful writer I strongly recommend if you are a Faye/Spike softie like me (or even if not tbh). And by @strayphoenix's 'Songs About Jane' which has the best version of Julia I've ever read and that I wish I had written. 
> 
> I have always been torn whether I think the show gave us enough of Julia - I like that it keeps a lot of things unsaid, and I don't know that she exactly fits into the fridged girlfriend category, but it still feels like some sort of trope and one I've seen many times. Whether or not I subverted that - well I just don't know. /End feminist rant.


End file.
